102 LETTER FROM WEST GERMANY D CEMBER 8 O NE day last spring, after the snows had melted and the str.eams of Oberhessen were flooding some of their winter swell, Willi Schäfer drove three miles from the town of Schlitz to a wood at the southeast foot of a little mountain called the Eisenberg-the iron moun- tain-to check the condition of the paths. Willi Schäfer comes from Schlitz and works at the town hall as a "minister of tourists," thinking up pleasant things-things like walks over the Eisenberg-for people in Schlitz to do. Every spring, three thousand of those people take Willi's big annual walk, and a few days before the walk Willi covers the mountain himself, putting up arrows and mark- ing out an itinerary. He was just turn- ing into the wood that day when he came on three or four American Army officers standing around a camp table in a clearing, looking at what seemed to be maps of the mountain, and about fifty American soldiers pacing trails and scrutinizing soil and measuring the terrain with odd -looking instru- ments on tripods. Willi counted four jeeps, two cars, an Army bus, and a helicopter in the clearing before the officers stopped him, telling him in perfect German that they were on a "secret action" and must be left alone. Willi came home with the news that the American Army was buying Schlitz's mountain. There had been rumors about the Eisenberg for months-rumors that ten thousand American troops were moving from a base at Baumholder, in the Rhineland, to the Eisenberg. There were rumors about a "master resta- tioning plan" that would shift the concentration of U .S. Forces in West Germany from "safe" bases in the south and the west to bases in towns like Schlitz, near the East German border. There were rumors about a new NATO "war plan" involving the deployment of a hundred and eight Pershing 2 missiles and ninety-six cruise missiles in West Germany. There were even rumors that some of those missiles were coming to the Eisenberg, though the fact is that the deployment, which began this month, was always intended for Baden- Würt- temberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. Back in February, the nature club- the Schlitz League for the Environ- ment and the Protection of N ature- had a meeting at the community center to talk about the rumors. Six hundred people showed up, and everyone of them seemed to have already heard a story about Americans on the Eisen- berg. They had heard that the Eisen- berg trails were blocked. They had heard about barbed-wire fences and bivouac tents and Special Forces pa- trolling the mountain with bayonets and machine guns. Some Green Party organizers from Fulda-the Greens in Germany are often given to hyperbole -told them about "Nazis stalking the woods with killer dogs." These Schlitzers were fearful and distressed, and their distress was unusual for a town as used to the American Army as Schlitz was. Every year, thirty or forty war games come through Schlitz and the sixteen villages of the township of Schlitzerland. Schlitz children grow up counting the fighter planes that swoop down over their M arktplatz and chasing convoys through the stone streets of the old walled town. Ameri- can tanks silt up the Schlitz River in the spring. American helicopters leak kerosene. American armored cars crack Schlitz's curbs and cornerstones. And there are days when military code transmissions jam the radio stations in Oberhessen and thousands of Ameri- can soldiers line up at the Schlitz com- munity center to use the showers. About two hundred and fifty thou- sand American soldiers are in Ger- many right now. Seventy-five thou- sand of those soldiers are in Hessen. Most are at bases in south Hessen near Frankfurt, where the V Corps of the U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army has its headquarters, but thousands are at bases in Oberhessen-some people call it north Hessen or east Hessen- in the foothills and valleys of a range J þ LJI 2ID DECEMBER 19,1983 of mountains that is cut by the Fulda River to form a long, low corridor from Thuringia, in East Germany, into Western Europe. Army strate- gists call this corridor the F ulda Gap. They think of it as a kind of natural war zone. Napoleon used it for his re- treat from Russia. Patton used it to push back the Wehrmacht in the spring of 1945. Today, NATO uses it for bases and for tactical-nuclear- weapons depots-soldiers call them atomic-artillery depots-and for war games and maneuvers that follow the Gap right up to the East German border. Schlitz is in the middle of the Fulda Gap, some twenty miles from the border and halfway between a squadron of the 11 th Armored Cav- alry Regiment, which is usually called the Black Horse Regiment, in Bad Hersfeld and the regiment's head- quarters in the city of Fulda, where the S.S. once had its officers' training school. Not many of the maneuvers in the Fulda Gap miss Schlitz and its six- teen villages. There are red-and-white coded military signs on country roads allover Schlitzerland. There are mys- terious manhole covers-set in groups of three, sealed into the road-at im- portant turnings, like the turning from Schlitz to the bridge to Fulda, which Schlitzers say are atomic demolition mines. Noone knows if they really are mines and, if they are, whether there are warheads in the mines and what keeps them from exploding or what keeps people from coming by at night and digging them up and, say, selling them to the Libyans. Noone knows what would trigger these mines in the course of a battle or in the course of avoiding a battle. Atomic demolition mines are obsolete by NATO standards, but NATO keeps them in West Ger- many, and people in Schlitz find this odd. They find it odd that there is a crossing of six-lane superhighways in a landscape whose major traffic prob- lem is the five-o'clock rush of milk cows coming in from pasture. The government says these superhighways were built to accommodate millions of foreign workers driving home to Tur- key or Yugoslavia in the summer, but people in Schlitz say that they were built for troop convoys. This year, the government is starting to lay tracks for a hundred-and-seventy-mile railroad -from Hannover to Würzburg-that will run through countryside like Schlitzerland, where few people ever travel, and will be six tracks wide in places into the bargain. People in Schlitz assume that this is simply the